The disclosed technology is related to system-on-chip security.
A system-on-chip (SoC) integrates the components of an electronic system such as a computer into a single integrated circuit or chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and radio-frequency functions. A typical SoC can include a microcontroller, microprocessor or digital signal processor (DSP) cores. Some SoCs, referred to as multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC), include more than one processor core. Other components include memory blocks such as ROM, RAM, EEPROM and Flash, timing sources including oscillators and phase-locked loops, peripherals including counter-timers, real-time timers and power-on reset generators, external interfaces including industry standards such as USB, FireWire, Ethernet, USART, SPI, analog interfaces such as analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs), and voltage regulators and power management circuits. Example applications for SoC include music players and video game consoles, among many other possible applications.
SOC's often expose interfaces to security features that allow developers and manufacturers of the devices to test and/or evaluate the devices. These interfaces are typically exposed as one or more pins that can be accessed by the developers or manufacturers of the devices, but can be interfaced in other manners. Although these interfaces are useful to the developers or manufacturers of the SoC's, they can also be a point of vulnerability for a system. For example, malicious users can attempt to use these interfaces to obtain access to internal components of the system and obtain access to data or information to which they were not intended to have access.